Monthly Archives: December 2014

I generally don’t do holiday cards; I find them tedious, unless I can somehow specialize each card, but those take time I usually don’t have; Decembers are really busy! Rather, I take this time to think of my loved ones, hold them in the highest, most beautiful light I can imagine, and send them waves of love. So, if you’re sitting there at some point, minding your own business, and a wave of love hits you out of the blue, it was me, sending you an ether-card.

But the draw-back to not doing cards is that I don’t usually send out a year in review thing. I don’t generally write mine up, but I do two a year: one in July and one in December. Back at my birthday, I was riding pretty high. I had figured out my last personal year (birthday to birthday): the end of 2013 had laid out quite a few personal challenges for me all at once, and the beginning of 2014 laid out the solutions for pretty much all of them. It was really rough going, but I survived. I feel like that was the year of Jumping The Hurdles. So now I’m trying to see where the arbitrary time-span of 2014 has taken me; what is the name of 2014? Continue reading The Hand I Was Dealt→

I wrote this piece of fiction a few years ago. I think it was because I was following a prompt to have certain items in my story. Anyway, it popped into my mind the other day, so I’m sharing it with you now.

Lost

“This stinks,” Paul announced, as he waded through the ankle-deep muck, sending his gaze around the surrounding area. “No, really. This stinks.”

Paul glanced at Buck. They’d been friends since the first day of kindergarten, when Tommy Malone had been picking on Buck for being a head taller than everyone else. The fact that Buck had been so shy he could barely put two words together didn’t help, either. It was Paul, the tiniest kid in the class, who stood up for Buck, pulling out a string of such imaginative names for the bully that Tommy had backed off, irritated and more than a little confused. Continue reading Lost→

The wedding festivities started a day early for us. We had been invited to a henna and games party the day before; it was an opportunity for families to mingle, for out of town guests to meet each other and/or give warm hugs to old friends. And play games. 🙂

Honey and I got settled in, playing many of the games that were available. We made some lovely new friends, too, as we told short stories during Dixit, traded oil for rice in Pit, and decided whether garbage bags were invented before or after the photocopier in Timeline. (After. Who knew?) Sadly, we couldn’t bring Honey’s game that’s about to be published, but that’s because Honey left his last copy with the publisher on the day he signed. Oh, well. Continue reading Impressions of a trip to New York: A Flashmob Wedding→

Our plane finally landed only 2.5 hours after it was supposed to. We had been worried about having a layover in Chicago: turns out Chicago’s weather was fine, but Newark told our plane to hold off because of their weather. It ended up being a blessing, because it forced me and Honey to wander around Midway and actually eat something. That was the only real meal either of us had all day.

After finally landing in Newark, we both had the same realization: each of us has lived in cold weather climates before, and while it was cold, it wasn’t arctic, just a breezy 35F or so. Hats were a good idea, but the long-johns, insulated self-heating socks, and hand warmers I had been considering would have been overkill. So that was nice. And bracing. Continue reading Impressions of a trip to New York: Touristing→

Travel Preproduction, Part I: Procrastination PhaseBegins one week before travel

I need to pack. I need to clean the kitchen. Do laundry. Pack the dogs’ belongings. Stop the mail. Argue with UPS over their fee for holding packages. Make a list of what to bring and what to pack–Lists are good.

Make a list of what to pack

Run to store to buy wedding gift. Don’t find anything I like. Maybe because it’s less than a week before the wedding??? Screw it; they get a check.

Add wedding gift check to packing list

Return to store to buy wedding card, selection of which by now only has two that aren’t religious, and one that isn’t saccharine and might have once said “happy birthday” before someone scratched that part out. Apparently there are a lot of December weddings. Who knew?

Add “Birthday Wedding card” to packing list

Make sure airline tickets are in order

Make sure hotel reservation is in order

Confirm drop-off/closing times with puppy sitter

Visit favorite pub for one last visit, because I might miss them when we’re gone. Also: nachos.

Make reservations with shuttle to get to the airport

Run to the store (AGAIN) to get timers so that robbers won’t know we’re not in the house.

Run to another store to buy enough food so that we can eat the night before we fly out, but not have tons of leftovers in the fridge while we’re gone, because that would be gross.

Eyeball kitchen again with a mental note that I REALLY need to clean it. Tomorrow.

On my way back from lunch the other day, I passed a man leaning back, with one foot resting on the wall behind him. He was happily puffing away on his cigarette, and it reminded me of way back when I was a kid.

When I was a kid, we traveled a lot. There were road-trips and flights to and from the grandparents’s house, and then once we got there, there was more driving, as we went to visit various family members within a few hours’ of their home. Road trips became synonymous with the same travel games, the same travel food, and the same travel music.

It was always the same. Perhaps that would be boring to some—certainly for the kids of the iPod generation—but for me, it was comforting. I knew it would take a long time, I’d better pee when I could, and I’d be getting my fill of Little Debbie snack cakes and star crunch cookies. (And hiding the apples my mother insisted I take so it looked like I ate those, too.)

I don’t like it when people wake me up. Hell, I don’t even like it when my own body wakes me up for necessities. Waking me up even 30 seconds before the alarm goes off can and will be considered an act of war. I’d like to blame this attitude on my insomnia from the last couple of years, but I’m fairly certain that I’ve been this way since childhood.

My mother used to act as my alarm clock when I was still in school. She’d come into my room softly, sit on the side of the bed, and gently rub my back, murmuring that it’s time to get up. It sounds really soothing– certainly it was the most pleasant call to morning I’ve ever had in my life. And at the time, the whole thing made me angry. I wanted Moar Sleep.

At the same time, I never want to go to bed. Call me Captain Inertia, I guess. If I’m awake and doing things, I want to stay awake forEVER. I don’t want to miss anything, and there are so many terribly interesting things to do, click, read, and play. When the clock hits Cinderella time, I turn into a total three-year-old. Continue reading Captain Inertia and the Catcher’s Mask→